Volume 11, 2011
Concepts of Tradition in Phenomenology
Roberto Terzi
Pages 195-220
La contamination et le retard
Phénoménologie de l’historicité et de la tradition chez Derrida
Through an immanent reversal of Husserl’s approach to the problems of genesis, writing, and time, Derrida radicalizes the phenomenology of historicity in the direction of a contamination between the empirical and the transcendental. In this paper, I argue that this also entails a transformation of the very concept of tradition: every tradition is always already tainted by the possibility of constitutional crisis and oblivion and it can only be questioned by thought after the historical fact. I conclude with an account of the general meaning of Derrida’s analysis of Husserl’s phenomenology, and indicate its importance for his later work.